Remembering Sir Francis Drake: Travel, Commemoration and National Identity in the Work of Henry Robarts

Abstract

Henry Robarts is a little-known writer whose work includes prose romances, records of state entertainments, and commendatory pamphlets on travel. This article pays particular attention to his celebrations of Sir Francis Drake, which form part of a sub-genre of writing on travel and which provide insights into how voyages of discovery figured in the late-sixteenth-century popular imagination. It considers how Robarts theorises the act of commemoration in these and other texts, and looks at the crucial role he imagines both it and travel to play in shaping England's national identity.